You may have come across that assertion before if you have the habit of visiting MRA sites on the net. I’ve seen it, but never found any sources for it, except for fuzzy hints that it’s because of prison rape of men is not included in the general rape statistics.

But the Gamergate led me to the tweets of one of its avid supporters, and the result is that one of this gentleman’s earlier tweets provided me with a source for the view that men are raped more often than women in this country.

More men are raped in the U.S. than woman, according to figures that include sexual abuse in prisons.
In 2008, it was estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the Department of Justice figures.
That is compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison.

Let’s look at those figures. First, a caveat: It’s possible that there are other sources which support the view that more men than women are raped in the United States (though I doubt that). All I try to do in this post is to analyze one particular source, the Daily Mail one. Second, it’s crucial to note that prison rape is horrible, that men, indeed, can be the victims of rape and that all rape victims deserve our concern and support. But we can do that with actual data, right?

To see what drives that paragraph above, note the following three criticisms:

It compares “sexual assault” with “rape” by giving us numbers about the former for prison and jail inmates while quoting some undefined source on the latter for the general non-institutional population. Sexual assault in the prison study the Daily Mail article refers to includes not only rape and attempted rape butany kind of unwanted sexual touching.

The concept of rape does not include that third category. Whether it includes attempted rape depends on where that 90,479 figure comes from. Thus, the above paragraph compares apples to oranges in the sense of the acts included under the categories of rape and sexual assault. The latter is a much wider category.

It’s difficult to determine from that paragraph the source of the rape counts for the non-institutional population. Sexual assault statistics tend to come from two sources: one consists of reports to the police or other authorities, the other consists of self-reporting by random individuals in the community. The former gives much lower rates of rape and other forms of sexual violence, partly because many forms of sexual violence are never reported to anybody.

The prison and jail data in this case comes from the latter kind of study: self-assessment by the inmates. We should compare that data to similarly created data from the general population, not to reported rates of rape.

The total number of sexual assault victims in the non-institutionalized population was 203,850. The share of female victims was 164,240 and the share of male victims 39,590.

The figure given in the Daily Mail article for rape (90,479) is not the correct measure for the comparisons the article attempts to make. For women that would be 164,240 if we compare sexual assault figures*. Note that you should not now run to compare that figure with the prison-and-jail victimization figure of 216,000. That’s because of the next criticism:

The study the Daily Mail article relies on covers BOTH male and female inmates in US prisons and jails. It’s wrong to assume that all the 216,000 inmates reporting sexual assault in 2008 were men. The quoted 90,479 figure for general rape rates may also include male victims. But in any case the comparisons become muddled when female victims in prisons and jails are put into the male victim category. This is how:

The 2008 prison-and-jail sexual victimization survey tells us that 4.4% of all prison and jail inmates reported being the victim of sexual assault that year.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find such overall figures separately for female and male inmates. The study does give us data by the gender of the inmate but it’s split into categories by the identity of the offender: either other inmate/inmates or prison or jail staff. Some inmates reported having been assaulted by both other inmates and the staff.

If we assume that the last category is the same, percentage-wise, for men and women victims, then my rough calculations suggest that 4.3% of adult men in prisons and 3.0% of adult men in jails were the victims of assault that year. Compare that with 6.3% of adult women in prisons and 4.2% of adult women in jails who reported that they were the victims of assault that year.

Here’s where I began truly questioning the original statement that more men than women are raped in the US. Now, the original data in the Daily Mail article doesn’t compare rape with rape, in any case, but looking at the last set of figures it’s clear that the overall victimization rates are higher for female inmates than for male inmates.

In 2008, the general percentages of sexual assault per 1000 non-institutionalized persons over the age of 12 in the US were 0.3% for men and 1.3% for women. However hard I try, I cannot make the magnitude ranking of those percentages flip by adding that prison-and-jail data with proper population weights. Because the female victimization rate inside prisons and jails is still higher than the male victimization rates.

Looking at the population inside prisons and jails does decrease the overall difference between female and male sexual assault victimization rates. That’s because the male population of prisons and jails is much higher than the female population and because sexual assault is much more common in those institutional settings than in the general population.

But it doesn’t flip the percentages. The Daily Mail article is wrong: Self-reported rates of sexual assault are still considerably higher for women than for men.

The point of this post? It’s always good to know what the data actually tells us. With the general warning that we should be careful about comparing disparate data sets, collected in different ways, it’s pretty safe to believe that more women than men are raped in the United States.

——
*It’s impossible to know if the general population survey questions are exactly comparable to the survey questions the inmates answered or if the possible response biases are the same in the two cases. All the comparisons should be treated with care for that reason.

To give you an example, one of the sources of the Daily Mail article also addresses the sexual victimization in juvenile facilities in 2011-2012. The rates of reported sexual assault by other inmates in those facilities were 5.4% for female inmates and 2.2% for male inmates. The rates of reported sexual assault by staff in those facilities were 8.2% for male inmates and 2.8% for female inmates.

These figures define sexual assault or sexual misconduct by staff as including contact initiated by the inmate or contact without any coercion. The data on female and male inmates together tells us that 3.5% of the respondents reported forced or coerced sexual contact with staff, 4.7% reported sexual contact with staff without any coercion, force or threat.

The latter type of sexual contact amounts to the abuse of authority by the staff. But sexual contact of this type is not counted in the sexual assault statistics of the general non-institutionalized population. If it were, any apparently voluntary sexual contact between the young and authority figures should be included.

Even if we decided to include non-coerced sexual contact with the staff of juvenile facilities in the “prison rape” category, the overall statistics on sexual assault by gender would not flip in magnitude rankings, because the number of juveniles in these facilities is so small.

Guest Post by the Ada Initiative, a not-for-profit organisation supporting women in open technology and culture (originally published at the Ada Initiative blog)

[Content Note: sexual harassment and assault]

Sometimes fighting harassment and assault at conferences feels like a losing battle. For every step forward, it seems like there’s another step back: A science fiction convention adopts a code of conduct, but then doesn’t enforce it for a Big Name Fan. People publicly identify a serial assaulter in skepticism, but then he threatens to sue and the blog post is taken down. Is a community without sexual harassment and assault too much to ask for in 2013?Conference anti-harassment campaigns do work – they “just” take several years of dedicated effort to succeed. In the free and open source community, it took about 3 years of concentrated work to get to the point where the vast majority of open source conferences have strong, specific, enforced anti-harassment policies. In 2013 we saw a record percentage of women attendees and speakers at one of the largest open source conferences in the world. Now open source communities are adopting codes of conduct that apply to online interaction too.

Why a history of anti-harassment campaigns?

We decided to chronicle the history of conference anti-harassment policies in three communities: science fiction and fantasy, skepticism and atheism, and free and open source software. The goal is to create a standard reference model of how conference anti-harassment campaigns usually work so that we can refer to it when the going gets tough. If you know what other communities went through – e.g., a phase of concerted online harassment of women leaders – then you are less likely to give up. We hope this history will help people working to end harassment in other geek communities: Wikipedia, computer security, anime and comics, computer gaming, and perhaps even academic philosophy.

About the authors

Mary and Valerie(CC BY-SA Adam Novak)

As a non-profit supporting women in open technology and culture, the Ada Initiative cares deeply about ending harassment in geek communities. Our co-founders, Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora, co-authored the most widely used example anti-harassment policy, hosted on the Geek Feminism Wiki. The Ada Initiative’s first project was working as full-time advocates for the adoption of policies in the open source community, often working directly with conference organizers and community leaders as advisors and coaches.

Stages of conference anti-harassment campaigns

Conference anti-harassment campaigns work, but it is hard to stay positive when you’re in the middle of one. Here’s the big picture of how they usually work, broken down into different stages (note that stages can overlap and have fuzzy boundaries – they are just useful reference points). See if any of this sounds familiar to you:

Stage 0: Harassment, assault, pornographic presentations, and sexist jokes are rampant at conferences, mainly targeting women. An informal network develops to warn likely victims individually about who to avoid. Victims are afraid to report non-public harassment. Many people quietly stop attending conferences, or only attend the safest ones. Some leave the community entirely.

Stage 1: A few very brave people say, “Hey, I was harassed at con X, and I didn’t like it!” As a reward, they become the target of even more harassment, usually along the lines of “You are too fat/ugly to be harassed,” “You deserve to be raped,” and “If you don’t like being harassed, leave.” If they name their attacker, the harassment is even worse: specific rape and death threats, nasty packages sent to their house, or denial of service attacks on their web sites.

Stage 2: A long period of discussion about whether harassment is even a bad thing ensues. Typical arguments in favor of condoning harassment involve women’s known love of compliments on their body parts from strangers, concerns about the extinction of the human species through banning “flirting,” comparisons to the Taliban, “freedom of speech,” and predictions that the quality of code/novels/articles/etc. will take a nose dive if harassment is banned. During this period, some people publicly announce they will stop attending conferences with the worst reputation for harassment and assault.

Stage 3: A few community leaders take a public stand against harassment, often prominent men who are horrified and embarrassed to discover this behavior goes on in their community. They are criticized heavily, but rarely the target of rape and death threats. Usually this has a net positive effect for the careers and reputations of the people who take a stand. Opponents of harassment are accused of “dividing the community.”

Stage 4: Someone suggests adopting a conference anti-harassment policy, usually one already in use by another conference. The organizers of one of the most progressive conferences immediately pledge to adopt a policy, followed quickly by two or three more. Each conference either adopts an existing policy, slightly rewrites it, or develops their own from scratch. A few months pass without new conferences adopting policies.

Stage 5: A few high profile harassment incidents occur at conferences with policies. They are usually handled well; when they aren’t they cause a huge outcry and more pressure to adopt (and enforce) policies. A dozen or so more conferences adopt policies. Victims of harassment begin to publicly name their harassers, often coordinating with other victims and influential allies.

Stage 6: Most conferences have anti-harassment policies, and most enforce them. Emboldened, victims talk more freely about their experiences and begin to notice patterns. At this point, even very powerful harassers begin to be publicly named. Some harassers lose their jobs, are banned from conferences, or lose their influence in the community. But harassers also fight back, with take-down notices, threats of legal action, or direct intimidation and threats.

Stage 7: Conferences become more awesome: more fun, more creative, and more productive. They are a safer and more welcoming space for women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, and many others. New people of all sorts begin joining the community. Serial harassers leave on their own or don’t join in the first place. The bizarre concept of treating all humans with respect and dignity spreads to other areas in the community, such as online discussion, local meetups, and publications.

When you understand the inevitable progression that begins when people start reporting harassment and assault – and other people publicly back them up – you can see why the backlash against simply reporting harassment is so strong. If the fight against harassment at conferences is successful, some people in the community will end up exposed as abusers, driven out of the community, fired from their jobs, not invited to speak any more, or ostracized. They will also lose what they value most of all: the opportunity to harass, assault, and abuse others.

Now, don’t you want to be part of making that happen?

History of the science fiction and fantasy campaign

The big picture: In 2010, Sexual harassment, stalking, and groping were common. Serial sexual harassers operated with impunity. The feminist science fiction convention, WisCon, was one of the only SF&F cons with an anti-harassment policy. Today, over 1000 people have pledged to attend only SF&F cons with anti-harassment policies, many cons have policies, and several serial harassers have been publicly identified, banned from conferences, and/or fired from their SF&F jobs. In terms of stages of anti-harassment campaigns, SF&F is somewhere around Stage 6.

Detailed timeline:

Willis’ 2006 Hugo Award-winning novella, Inside Job

August 2006: At the WorldCon science fiction and fantasy convention, Harlan Ellison gropes Connie Willis’ breast on stage during the Hugo awards ceremony (both are Hugo-award winning authors), kicking off extensive online discussion about sexual harassment in the SF&F community.

April 2008: At Penguicon, a hybrid science fiction and Linux convention, attendees create The Open Source Boob Project, in which some attendees wore buttons to signal whether they are open to requests to touch them sexually. The creator later had a change of heart and publicly stated that he thought the project did more harm than good by causing women to feel unsafe.

The Geek Feminism Wiki page “Timeline of Incidents” is started. This page records the sexist incidents in geek communities and currently goes back as far as 1973. The Timeline of Incidents, along with the rest of the Geek Feminism Wiki, eventually become vital resources in the fight for anti-harassment policies.

Alex “Skud” Bayley, Geek Feminism founder

August 2009: The Geek Feminism Blog is founded by Alex “Skud” Bayley, with frequent contributions from Mary Gardiner, Terri Oda, K. Tempest Bradford, and many others. With a firm moderation policy, this blog becomes a safe space to discuss geeky and/or feminist topics, including fandom, technology, and activism.

July 2013:Science fiction editor James Frenkel leaves Tor shortly after being reported for sexual harassment at WisCon 2013 by Elise Matthesen. More revelations about sexual harassment in SF&F, both by Frenkel and others, follow. Key people involved in reporting the harassment and providing support include John Scalzi, Jim Hines, Adam Lipkin, Sigrid Ellis, K. Tempest Bradford, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

WylloNyx explains why anti-harassment policies are not sex-negative and would not prevent consensual sexual activity at conferences. “A lack of statement about non-harmful sexual expression is neutral on the sex positivity scale. That harassment policies make it clear that they offer protection against non-consensual sexual expression makes the harassment policies sex positive. It means that not only the ‘yay, sex is awesome’ part isn’t shamed but also the ‘sex isn’t always awesome’ aspect is addressed to the protection of attendees and speakers. To address both aspects of sex positivity clearly without shame makes sexual harassment policies sex positive.”

Ashley Paramore reports being repeatedly groped in front of several people at TAM in 2012, without naming her attacker. The conference anti-harassment team banned the assaulter from future TAMs. Several other people back up her story. Paramore is still harassed and threatened for publicly reporting her attack.

January 2010: Open source software conference linux.conf.au 2010 adopts a discrimination policy that specifically bans several kinds of harassment.

June 2010: At Southeast LinuxFest, an attendee sexually harasses, assaults, and follows several women around the conference. The incidents aren’t connected until the last day of the conference, when the organizers finally eject the harasser from the conference.

June 2012:Michelle Smith proposes that Django community members take a pledge not to attend conferences without a code of conduct. Julia Elman and Paul Smith create the Let’s Get Louder web site to collect signatures from the Django and Python community members who “pledge only to attend, speak at, assist, sponsor, or otherwise participate in conferences that publicly promote an anti-harassment and anti-discrimination code of conduct policy.” As of August 2013, it has 300 signatures. Mark Lavin also assisted.

November 2012: Remy Sharp creates http://confcodeofconduct.com/, a web site collecting translations of a conference code of conduct based on the Ada Initiative template.

Current status of anti-harassment campaigns

As you can see, the SF&F, atheist/skeptic, and free and open source software communities have made great progress in fighting sexual harassment and assault at conferences. So what’s the big picture for conference anti-harassment campaigns in other communities as of August 2013?

Wikipedia and related projects: All Wikimedia Foundation events, including the world-wide Wikimania conference, have anti-harassment policies in place and enforced. Discussion of online behavior standards is in progress (Stage 6-7).

Computer security: A few conferences have anti-harassment policies. Raising awareness of the problem of sexual harassment and assault at conferences continues (Stage 3-4).

Computer gaming: Some computer game conferences have anti-harassment policies, but booth babes, sexualization of women, and groping remain rampant at most (Stage 3-4).

Anime and comics: Some cons have anti-harassment policies, but consent for photography and sexual harassment remain problems at many of cons, especially the larger and more commercial ones (Stage 3-4)

We’re not all the way there yet in any of the geek communities we’ve looked at, but we’ve come a long way from where we started. If we continue working together to change our communities to be more welcoming to women, we will eventually overcome.

How you can help

CC BY-SA Adam Novak

Whether you are the leading novelist in your field, or a lurker on a mailing list, you can take action to stop conference harassment. You can use your words, your influence, your money, and your participation to change the culture in your community.

Men, even good men, believe women lie about rape. There’s this myth that runs amok saying that some enormous proportion of rape accusations are just women lying to get attention, or revenge, or to hide their summer fling from mommy and daddy. And they believe it without question.

When male friends toss that grenade at me, I toss it back by asking if they know what the percentage is. “Fifty percent,” they’ll say, or above, depending on which MRAs their stats are coming from.

“It’s two to eight percent,” I say, and I need to remember to never do this when they’re walking or have something in their mouths, because the good ones are always staggered, and they always gasp. “But even those numbers are on the high side.”

Image courtesy of Tim Fields via Flickr

I don’t need to go in to detail with the good ones. I don’t need to do more than remind them what actually happens to women who report. They realize immediately that very few people would be so motivated by some other factor that they would willingly subject themselves to the hell that is rained down upon rape victims. And then I remind them that while our culture often makes reporting a rape worse than the rape itself, when it comes to male victims, it’s damned near impossible to report at all. And if you’re a trans* person? Hell doesn’t even begin to describe it. Once we have finished that brief survey of Rape Culture Today, the good ones never spout nonsense statistics again.

For those who stubbornly wish to believe that bitches be lyin’, I can point them at studies. I have before and will again. But in the future, I will first make them chew on this “false” rape allegation statistic until their teeth break.

Now, some of them will spit out that report along with their shattered teeth and flap their bleeding gums at me: “That’s just an anecdote.” And that is true. It is just one data point behind the 2-8%. Since we are Good Skeptics™, we know to look beyond anecdotes.

Now add the horrific treatment victims experience from defense attorneys who believe they’re scum. I can tell you from experience this can be worse than the rape. It can be a form of torture, and like torture victims, some rape victims will recant just to make the pain stop. Magically, their allegation is now “false.” But they’re no less raped, and the rapist is no less a sexual predator.

Add in the fact that some rapists have the lock on society, and can crush their victims. If their victims had the courage to report, they’ve soon got their buddies to sweep the crime under the rug. And another several ticks are added in the “false” rape allegation column.

Add in the fact that some police departments don’t make a distinction between “reports that are actually, genuinely, provably false” and “reports that can’t be prosecuted due to statute of limitations, lack of evidence, or some other reason, but no doubt the victim was assaulted.” Both numbers end up counting under “false” allegations, although a sizable percentage weren’t false at all.

The reality is that false rape allegations are a tiny bit of flotsam on a sea of rape. Even if that 2-8% number were accurate, it would still be far too small to use to discount rape allegations out of hand. The fact that even that tiny percentage is inflated by cases like EEB’s should ensure that every decent human being treat victims’ reports as provisionally true. The idea that most or even many rape allegations are false is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. Those who continue to insist otherwise have forfeited any right to be considered good people.

Write what you like on topics within the general ambit of this blog, but here’s some suggestions for useful contributions:

links to recent posts/articles that relate to topics covered by the FAQs here (and the best links might even be added to the Further Reading Lists on some of those FAQs);

mentions of current events that illustrate examples relevant to the FAQs here;

links to posts/articles covering beyond-101 topics, as matters of general feminist/womanist interest;

recommendations on people/hashtags to follow on Twitter etc;

shameless self promotion of events, new blogs, new projects etc but keep it on-topic – feminist/womanist/intersectional and progressive;

let me know about any dead links on the older posts, and I’ll see if I can find a cached/archived version and update the link.

As a courtesy to other readers, please include content notes for any NSFW content or content that would be rated PG+ if it was part of a movie or would be prefaced with a “this may be distressing for some viewers” disclaimer on the TV news. This is so that others may make an informed choice on an appropriate time and place for reading such content.

All comments will go to the moderation queue, and the queue will be attended to in chunks in two or threeintermittent modding sessions rather than dealt with as items arrive. So please have patience – so long as you abide by the comments policy your comment will eventually appear. If you don’t abide by the comments policy your comment may still appear in a redacted form, with all redactions noted as such for transparency.

P.S. WordPress notifications of comments requiring moderation here aren’t coming through to my email at the moment. I’m trying to fix that, but it’s making comment moderation take even longer than usual.

Share this:

Another month another Open Thread! Write what you like on topics within the general ambit of this blog, but here’s some suggestions for useful contributions:

links to recent posts/articles that relate to topics covered by the FAQs here (and the best links might even be added to the Further Reading Lists on some of those FAQs);

mentions of current events that illustrate examples relevant to the FAQs here;

links to posts/articles covering beyond-101 topics, as matters of general feminist/womanist interest;

recommendations on people/hashtags to follow on Twitter etc;

shameless self promotion of events, new blogs, new projects etc but keep it on-topic – feminist/womanist/intersectional and progressive;

let me know about any dead links on the older posts, and I’ll see if I can find a cached/archived version and update the link.

As a courtesy to other readers, please include content notes for any NSFW content or content that would be rated PG+ if it was part of a movie or would be prefaced with a “this may be distressing for some viewers” disclaimer on the TV news. This is so that others may make an informed choice on an appropriate time and place for reading such content.

All comments will go to the moderation queue, and the queue will be attended to in chunks in two or three modding sessions daily rather than dealt with as items arrive. So please have patience – so long as you abide by the comments policy your comment will eventually appear. If you don’t abide by the comments policy your comment may still appear in a redacted form, with all redactions noted as such for transparency.

Share this:

More Open Thread! Write what you like on topics within the general ambit of this blog, but here’s some suggestions for useful contributions:

links to recent posts/articles that relate to topics covered by the FAQs here (and the best links might even be added to the Further Reading Lists on some of those FAQs);

mentions of current events that illustrate examples relevant to the FAQs here;

links to posts/articles covering beyond-101 topics, as matters of general feminist/womanist interest;

recommendations on people/hashtags to follow on Twitter etc;

shameless self promotion of events, new blogs, new projects etc but keep it on-topic – feminist/womanist/intersectional and progressive;

let me know about any dead links on the older posts, and I’ll see if I can find a cached/archived version and update the link.

As a courtesy to other readers, please include content notes for any NSFW content or content that would be rated PG+ if it was part of a movie or would be prefaced with a “this may be distressing for some viewers” disclaimer on the TV news. This is so that others may make an informed choice on an appropriate time and place for reading such content.

All comments will go to the moderation queue, and the queue will be attended to in chunks in two or three modding sessions daily rather than dealt with as items arrive. So please have patience – so long as you abide by the comments policy your comment will eventually appear. If you don’t abide by the comments policy your comment may still appear in a redacted form, with all redactions noted as such for transparency.

I don’t have much new to say, because the focus of this blog has always been 101 topics, and the fundamentals of Feminism 101 remain the same as they were when this blog began, and there are many other sites where one can find readings to guide one’s feminist journey further.

People still keep contacting me however, and not just the ubiquitous guest-post-spammers who claim to have been reading this blog forever and then within a few sentences reveal that claim as a great big lie. Some of you really want to see more action here again. But I’m just not sure that I have anything new to say within the constraints of what this blog was always meant to focus on.

I’ve decided therefore that I’ll experiment with monthly Open Threads for a while and see what you all come up with. Ideally I’d like to see:

links to recent posts/articles that relate to topics covered by the FAQs here (and the best links might even be added to the Further Reading Lists on some of those FAQs);

mentions of current events that illustrate examples relevant to the FAQs here;

links to posts/articles covering beyond-101 topics, as matters of general feminist/womanist interest;

recommendations on people/hashtags to follow on Twitter etc;

shameless self promotion of events, new blogs, new projects etc but keep it on-topic – feminist/womanist/intersectional and progressive;

let me know about any dead links on the older posts, and I’ll see if I can find a cached/archived version and update the link.

As a courtesy to other readers, please include content notes for any NSFW content or content that would be rated PG+ if it was part of a movie or would be prefaced with a “may be distressing for some viewers” disclaimer on the TV news. This is so that others may make an informed choice on an appropriate time and place for reading such content.

All comments will go to the moderation queue, and the queue will be attended to in chunks in two or three modding sessions daily rather than dealt with as items arrive. So please have patience – so long as you abide by the comments policy your comment will eventually appear. If you don’t abide by the comments policy your comment may still appear in a redacted form, with all redactions noted as such for transparency.

Many thanks for the suggestion. Since s.e.smith wrote that post on Tiger Beatdown in 2011, nothing has improved regarding the torrents of abuse directed at outspoken women online (and it’s not only feminists and other social justice advocates, either – being outspoken about knitting or cupcakes can also garner a woman an obsessive cyberstalking hate cadre who pound their keyboards with a persistence and intensity that similarly outspoken men rarely seem to attract).

So, dear readers – moar links plz! Anything you have bookmarked over the last few years regarding this issue would be useful. Please format your links to include author/blog/title information, ideally with a sentence or few to summarise the post and/or a short quote. This is not only more helpful than a naked URL for readers to jog their memory about which posts they have or haven’t read, but it’s also much better SEO to make this page more visible for those searching for links in the future.

It’s grinding and relentless and we’re told collectively, as a community, to stay silent about it, but I’m not sure that’s the right answer, to remain silent in the face of silencing campaigns designed and calculated to drive us from not just the Internet, but public spaces in general. To compress us into small boxes somewhere and leave us there, to underscore that our kind are not wanted here, there, or anywhere.

These posts ask readers to drop relevant links that they tend to share widely because they do a great job explaining/clarifying basic feminist concepts or debunking anti-feminist myths/factoids (please check that it hasn’t already been linked in an FAQ by searching on the post title). Obviously this is mainly looking for recent posts/articles (within the last 6 months or so), but older material should also be linked if it’s stuff that you just keep on referencing in recent discussions.

If a relevant link happens to be one of your own writings, then please shamelessly self-promote it! And if a post of yours, or a friend’s post, gets linked by somebody else, by all means squee delightedly here in response.

In general, if somebody else posts a link that you were going to post, please respond with a note to that effect in comments. Treat it as an upvote, and why not go right ahead and leave other topical links in your response?

In particular, if you know of a post that would fit into the Further Reading section on any of the FAQs, please please please drop a link with that recommendation – a lot of those posts referenced in the FAQs date back half a decade or more, and I’d like to expand the related links sections with more recent references as well. Also if you think that a post already linked in one FAQ is also relevant to another FAQ, please say so.

They specifically chose a topic about which most people know very little and do not already have any opinion. Neither the article nor the comments contain sufficient information to turn the readers into experts on the subject. So they have to use mental heuristics – shortcuts – to decide what to think about this new subject. Uncivil, aggressive comments resulted in quick polarization. Readers, although still not well informed about the topic, quickly adopted strong opinions about it.

1-9-90 rule

about 1% of the participants produce most of the content, another 9% participate regularly by editing (e.g., on a wiki), commenting (on blogs and articles), occasionally producing new content (in forums, etc), and the remaining 90% are ‘lurkers’ who do not publicly participate but only read

Where are the comments?

most of the good, nice, constructive commenters may have gone silent and taken their discussions of your blog [to social media platforms], but the remaining few commenters are essentially trolls.

The question every blogger in this situation has to ask is – what to do next?

Comment moderation

What does it mean to moderate comments? Different people have different ideas about it, but many focus on technical fixes.

Engagement – the most important element of comment moderation is the presence of the author in the commenting thread. Responding to readers’ comments, thus showing that they are being read, observed and appreciated, is the most effective way to make sure that the discussions stay on topic and do not veer over the line of appropriateness. Sometimes a comment hurts, or makes you angry. Sleep over it. Then come up with a smart, witty, civil and firm response. Be in control of your own commenting threads:

So, why are so many comment threads so nasty?

Because they are not moderated! […] If you don’t delete or disemvowel inappropriate comments, people will think you are not even reading the comment threads. If you don’t show up in person, nobody will know you are even interested in their thoughts. If you don’t delete the trolls, the trolls will take over and the nice people will go somewhere else.

[…] And if you are a blogger, and your comment threads are nasty, you have only yourself to blame.

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In this section Bora is especially addressing science blogging, which is his area. Other areas of inquiry may not share every rigorous convention of the scientific method, but the following point extrapolates well to most discussions of sociopolitical interest:

Those of us who have pursued an education, even an amateur one, in history/anthropology are often struck by how ignorant many anti-feminists are regarding the breadth of social variations regarding conventions of gender expression over time and location. When contrarian commentors post anti-factual comments which are left to stand by the moderator, then those comments distort and suppress the subsequent discourse.

How do you decide what is a trolling comment?

[…] I am certainly not using cowardly, mealy-mouthed He-Said-She-Said mode of writing my own posts, so I will also not allow for a He-Said-She-Said pseudo-debate to develop in my comment threads. You don’t like it? Deal with it. Go and complain in the comments on [a more sympathetic blog], or on your Facebook wall.

Those whose comments are deleted, for whatever reason, on one blog/forum? They remain free to repost those comments on another blog/forum. Their freedom of speech has not been denied.

Bora’s moderation rules

Now, I know that I used the example of Global Warming Denialism here the most – mainly because it is currently the most acute problem on our site – but the same goes for people harboring other anti-scientific ideas: creationists, anti-vaxxers, knee-jerk anti-GMO activists, and others.

This post is not about climate denial, it is about commenting and comment moderation. It is about the fact that eliminating trolls opens the commenting threads to more reasonable people who can actually provide constructive comments, thus starting the build-up of your own vigorous commenting community.

I’ll leave it to readers to make their own analogies to feminist/anti-feminist tropes in place of the science/anti-science tropes noted by Bora.

Take Home Message

Civil rights of Free Speech do not come bundled with any rights to a free audience.

On the contrary, audiences are the ones with the right of Free Association in terms of to whose words they pay attention. Don’t let yourself be bullied into publishing disruptive comments that drive away the commentors who add value to discussion of your posts. Nobody is obliged to listen to anybody who is being a jerk.

There are seven billion people on the planet, many of them potentially useful commenters on your site. Don’t scare them away by keeping a dozen trolls around – you can live without those, they are replaceable.

And as a final rebuttal to the asinine Freeze Peach arguments – in the words of science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who happens to be rather a Glibertarian icon, people who have built a platform are not obliged to share it with anybody else – folks remain free to build their own platforms:

Hire your own hall. We paid for this one.

Don’t let other people hijack what you have built. You owe your readers more than that.